Meghan McCain said Wednesday on “The View” that Democratic Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s demand for more Asian-American representation could backfire.
Duckworth said she would be a “no” vote on any cabinet nominations until President Joe Biden put forth an AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) candidate. However, McCain argued she could be playing into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hands. (RELATED: ‘McConnell Is An Absolute Gangster’: Meghan McCain Says Republicans Should Replace RBG, But Beware)
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“Meghan, when you see somebody say, hey, listen, I need us to be represented, do you think she should have done it differently?” co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked.
“There’s nothing Mitch McConnell loves more than this,” McCain began. “There will be more no votes from Democrats unless people are being put in cabinet positions.”
McCain believed cabinet posts were of the utmost importance in any administration, and for that reason, they should be filled based on qualifications rather than demographics.
“The question Democrats have to reconcile with right now is whether or not race and gender are more important than qualification,” McCain continued. “If you have someone who is more qualified who happens to be a white straight person who is more on paper, has more experience in whatever field they’re being nominated for than a minority with less experience, are we now in a place where this matters? There’s a lot of really interesting politics going on in the country.”
McCain cited the lawsuits over Ivy League schools not admitting Asian Americans at the same rate as black students, as well as the stimulus payments specifically set aside for minority farmers in the recent coronavirus aid package.
“If they’re qualified to get into Ivy Leagues, race and gender is more important than your skill qualifications, the content of your character, it is not what Martin Luther King Jr. preached. I think this is a very, very slippery slope,” McCain added. “I was surprised to hear someone like Tammy Duckworth say something like this. She got a lot of blowback from a lot of people, not just on the right.”
“Just to put a cap on this, ‘The View’ is 25 years old next year. We’ve only had one Asian American host co-host the show. Does that mean that one of us should be leaving at some point because there’s not enough representation?” McCain said, calling it the “natural progression of identity politics.
“Is identity politics more important than qualifications of a job? And I think that’s a question going forward that the progressive left is going to have to reconcile,” she concluded.
